January 22, 2007: Downmarket Celebrity Rehab

Wondering how rehab might differ for an Elizabeth Taylor or a Lindsay Lohan vs. your typical junkie on the street?

Read Lush Life: How Stars Make a Mockery of Rehab by Maureen Callahan. It's like Private Benjamin goes to detox. Ummm, I didn't sign up for this "cleaning-toilets-sleeping-on-bunk-beds-like-prison-and-forced-therapy" rehab, I signed up for the one with the condos on the beach and the room service.

"...Celebrities - with their narcissism, high levels of creativity and standard of living - require not only a paradigmatic shift in living quarters but in treatment itself. She maintains that programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and Betty Ford (where patients are assigned roommates in Spartan rooms and attend group therapy) are, in a word, downmarket.

'For the addict in the street who has nothing, that works beautifully - because they have nothing, period,' Kunzli says. 'Our approach is for the very successful person - what I call 'the power elite.'

Bill White, considered by many in the field to be the among the country's foremost addiction specialists, finds this philosophy to be 'a gross misrepresentation.' He pauses. 'Show me one piece of scientific data that supports that statement. There isn't any.'

In fact, according to White, such centers are not new, and Kunzli is hardly the visionary she claims to be: 'There has always been a market for high-end treatment, going back to the 1800s,' he says, pointing to the Keeley Institute, which had more than 120 facilities throughout the U.S. and Europe.

White adds that such facilities were highly controversial, administering mysterious medications and dubious cures - one of which, the double bichloride of gold cure, was reported to have killed some patients and driven others insane. 'They were also accused of aggressive marketing tactics and financial misconduct,' he adds.

Is there any way to get some of that "bichloride of gold cure" to Paris Hilton now? Maybe we can drive her insane before she continues her one-woman crusade to act out and annoy.